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The space part of the book always seemed weirdly out of place to me given its near future run-down setting. It's unclear exactly when the novel was set, but pro

The space part of the book always seemed weirdly out of place to me given its near future run-down setting. It's unclear exactly when the novel was set, but probably within 50 years of its publication date of 1984. I can see how things like VR interfaces and even human-level AI could be early/mid 21st century things (particularly from the 1980s viewpoint), but things like cities in orbit seems more like a distant future several centuries out.

saltcured 8y ago
I recently watched a 1979 James Burke history show which was commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the moon landings. I was too young when this show was produced to really remember this time period clearly. This made me think about the timeline of the space age and just how short it was. That crowning moment was only about 15 years after the first satellite or 25 years after the end of WW2, when jet engines were barely known to the world. For someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost. To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.

saltcured 8y ago

I recently watched a 1979 James Burke history show which was commemorating the 10 year anniversary of the moon landings. I was too young when this show was produced to really remember this time period clearly. This made me think about the timeline of the space age and just how short it was. That crowning moment was only about 15 years after the first satellite or 25 years after the end of WW2, when jet engines were barely known to the world. For someone like Gibson, that period was their childhood. They can be forgiven for assuming it would continue to rapidly expand. In the early 1980s, we had the space shuttles going up like clockwork and MTV was using film clips of those big moon rockets as part of their station-identification clips. By and large, people still thought of space as present and future tense. People didn't really understand it as a demonstration of massive budget redirection and military-industrial might, and that nothing had really been done to solve the physics and make space travel a consumer possibility with low marginal cost. To me, Gibson's later works try to correct that mistake. His focus shifts ever more towards the information flows, power brokers, and large-scale consumerism. He turns away from the military and space age set pieces. He treats weapons more as artifacts and surplus of a bygone era, just as this big nation-state technology must have seemed to him relics of his past.